Recent years have seen a proliferation of portable electronic devices such as personal digital assistants (PDA's), cellular telephones, and/or other portable electronic devices. Some such devices also include input/output ports to communicate with computer systems, printers, and other devices using either electrical cables or wireless communication interfaces such as Infrared data communications interfaces. In many cases, these portable electronic devices feature limited computing capacity and correspondingly limited functionality. For example, some personal digital assistants may include enough memory to store a specific number of documents, but may not be able to execute larger applications that are necessary to render the stored documents into a format that is compatible with a particular printer for printing.
In other situations, a portable electronic device such as a laptop computer may not be limited in terms of computer capacity, but may not include the proper applications to render a particular document for a particular printer. For example, assume that a particular document stored in the portable electronic device was received as an attachment to an electronic mail message from a third party. Also assume the third party created the document using a specific word processor that is not included in the portable electronic device. Even thought the user has access to a printer that can interface with the portable electronic device, unfortunately, the document cannot be rendered for printing by the portable electronic device since the portable electronic device does not include the specific word processor.
If any of the above situations exists, a user may find themselves in a place with a printer that can communicate with their portable electronic device, but they would be frustrated in any attempt to print a document from the portable electronic device.